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You can do two-story with zdoom and have it look good. It involves using some altered (invisible) hanging sprites to walk on and also using the sector "transfer heights" special to make
proper floor and ceiling displays. The transfer heights special is the same thing used to make swimmable water.

I have no idea if this method can be extended to more than two
playable surfaces or stories...it probably can be done with the sprites at different levels, but getting additional ceilings and floors may not work out...you might have to use some of those horizontal ladder-like affairs to give some visual substance to a walkable surface.

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Don't give up too fast. What you need to do is get a few wads to examine. That's what I do, see something cool and study the wad to find out how it can be done. There are some good tutorials from Rick Clark, don't know the url right now, maybe someone can let us know where they reside lately?

Be aware that those walk-on invisible sprites use a dehacked patch in the wad....use Wintex to save the dehacked patch to a file and then open it with dehacked...you'll see the properties
of the invisible things being used to walk on.

I'll bet there are quite a few skilled wad editors reading these
forums who would have the time to help implement some technical detail in one of your wads. A few folks have helped me out, I'm
willing to do the same now.

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Guest fragg

Guest fragg

I'm afraid my skills are lower than you think. However, I don't like to be bugging Rick alla time (I do it too much already &lt;g&gt;).

Sure, I got PrBoom running in WadAuthor after some tinkering with patches, and all runs fine, and am now building a map.
But, re. your suggestion ("load a downloaded wad into game, and study its details") -- yes I can download a wad, but lack know-how, to "load the Wad" into a game.

Reasons: don't know what commands to type, or even how to get a 'command line' (or whatever its called).
The problem is, most tutor Docs assume you "already know" the basics. So they don't include "how-to" Examples. I'm looking around for tutor that "newby-explains" things. Eventually I'll find one.

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I know you want to learn as few additional programs as possible, but you could consider Edge, which allows floor-over-floor. I believe Rick Clark has a tutorial on it.

If you want just DooM2 with ZDooM, you can also check out Rick's tutorial on Two Story Buildings under Miscellaneous Tutorials. As Biffy points out, it is based on the same principle for creating the "deep water" effect and the "3D bridge" effect.

In simple terms, the deep water effect in a pool is achieved by transferring the ceiling/floor heights of a (hidden) control sector to your pool at certain times. Thus, when you are outside the pool, the surface of the pool appears to be where it should be (even though in reality the sector is deeper and the true floor is lower). This is because the floor of the control sector (water graphic) is set to the height that the water in the pool should appear, and that height is projected to the pool sector. Likewise, when you jump into the pool, the surface of the water appears to be above you (like it should when you're underwater). This is again because the floor of the control sector is set to the height of the water surface in the pool. This time, the ceiling of the control sector (water graphic) is projected onto the pool sector creating the illusion of the water surface as seen from underwater.

The 3D bridge effect is created by doing 2 things. First, the bridge itself is created by inserting lines that represent the floor rails of the bridge. The &lt;u&gt;main&lt;u&gt; texture should be one that is around 16 high (STEPTOP is commonly used), lower unpegged, and z height of, say, 128 above the ground. When complete, this will look like a ladder laid horizontally across your path, at a height of 128 above the ground. Second, you need to create and insert a series of "invisible" and blocking things at a height that corresponds to the ladder-like bridge. Blocking, so that you can step on it and not fall through your bridge, invisible for obvious reasons. (You can replace something like the Chain w/Half Player Torso and Legs (blocking) with a graphic of a "transparent" pixel -- WinTex uses cyan as the transparent color.) The things are at a height that allow you to walk under the bridge and not be blocked, and when you want to cross the bridge make it appear that you are walking on the bridge floor rails.

I guess what Biffy meant when he said examine other people's wads was that you should open them in a level editor and see what the authors did. You don't need any command lines for that. Especially if you're using editors such as WadAuthor, you can run ZDooM directly from the editor -- so checking out a feature in editor mode and in in-game mode is a cinch.

I laud your interest in pushing the limits of your editing skills, but 3D architecture is extremely challenging. Perhaps you should give the old "fake it" method (build "one sector behind another sector") another chance. Aside from using up map space, it can look quite convincing. Good luck.